 |
VASE: Virtual Assignment Server Environment http://achieve.utoronto.ca/vase Presented at the Fifth Annual Teaching in the Community Colleges Online Conference, "A Virtual Odyssey: What's Ahead for New Technologies in Learning?" (April 12-14, 2000) Kapi'olani Community College, University of Hawai'i, Honolulu, Hawaii. http://achieve.utoronto.ca/papers/tcon2000 |
|
Jason Nolan Knowledge Media Design Institute University of Toronto |
 |
This presentation covers the conceptualization, design, implimentation and preliminary evaluation of the VASE: Virtual Assignment Server Environment project. Key issues are educator-centred web-based software environments, open source technologies for education, and relocalizing the control of online learning technologies into the hands of the educators out of the control of non-teaching technicians. The purpose of the VASE project is to develop a web-based environment for the creation, completion, submission, and publication of student course work over the world wide web. No platform exists for this kind of use of Educational Technology at this time. Many courses that want to use and publish on the net are not web design courses, and there is no interest in studying the technology, or evaluating students based on their ability to design web based educational products. This presentation covers one example of how an educator might 'whip up' a solution that meets the criteria described above, and pushes a pedagogically driven notion of technology development.
The purpose of this project is to develop a web-based environment for the creation, completion, submission, and publication of student course work over the world wide web. No platform exists for this kind of use of Educational Technology at this time. Using this Collaborative Virtual Environment server, instructors will be able to ‘design’ the format or layout of an assignment template that students will use. Students will link to the VASE site from their course home page, and fill in the template with their research and writing. They will be able to then return to their work from any web browser and continue work on their project. All work will be saved on a server, so no student data will be lost due to lost disks or crashed hard drives. When the student submits work for evaluation, three things will happen: they will no longer be able to edit the work; the instructor will be notified; and the web page will be ready to be viewed by their peers.
Using this environment, instructors will be able to 'design' the format or layout of an assignment template that students will use. Students will link to this site from their course home page, and fill in the template with their research and writing.
Vase is based on a decade of experience teaching and tutoring online, and 5 years working with MOOs and educators, and more recently students. I wanted to have an environment for doing work that met my basic criteria. Those criteria are pretty ideosyncratic, but that's what being a teacher is all about.
Criteria: use existing technology, free, opensource, teacher driven design, emergent design, open ended design, strong teacher and student help mechanisms, minimal technical faciltiy required
VASE is based on a MOO database and server environment (If you're unsure as to what a MOO is don't worry, just ignore it for now.). For the version of VASE under discussion, we're using a raw EncoreMOO (http://lingua.utdallas.eduencore/) database with modifications. An EncoreMOO differs from a text-only MOO of which some of you are already familiar by providing synchronous communication and web environments in the same web browser window. There are other features as well, but this is the feature that illustrates what we have done. And what we have done is to remove the synchronous element, and leave only the web interface. VASE is just the web component of the Encore, with the text components neatly hidden.
The reason for using a MOO core and then removing the ability to chat and program seems on the surface to be silly on the surface. But there are a couple of reasons that make a MOO the best server environment for an assignment server like VASE. First of all, we originally designed VASE to alsowork inside of the Project Achieve virtual environment (http://achieve.utoronto.ca/), which is also an Encore-based MOO with the synchronous communications facilities intact, and only later realized that we could run VASE as a stand alone environment. Secondly, having worked with a number of canned products in the past, such as WebCsile, Knowledge Forum, BSCW, FirstClass, MOO, UltimateBB, all of which had many features to their credit, but which suffered from the problem of their technocentric design. Finally, because of the Object-oriented nature of MOOs we were able to prototype this environment as you see it very quickly and very inexpensively. So much so in fact that we can give it away. VASE version 2.0 will become part of Encore Version 3.0 to be released this summer.
| I wanted something that was teacher centred, me centred, curriculum centred. I was, and am, tired of canned code where someone who is not an active teacher is telling me what options I can have or can't have interms of my instructional technology, but I had no experience with doing it myself. VASE was this opportunity. |
All the work done on VASE was completed by myself and a first year computer science student, Matthew Beerman, with he doing all the coding.
We developed a working prototype, that was tested in a third year environmental studies course I teach at the University of Toronto, ENV321Y, in the spring of1998. It consisted of the student elements only and a fixed assignment model (login as guest and no password) that was coded by hand, assignment instructions and help files. Student results were promising, though of course some images have since disappeared into cyberspace.
The goal was to see if we could develop a tool that would distance the process of learning about how a web page was constructed from the process of constructing a web page. Pedagogically they are very different processes. From a curricular perspective they have little to do with one another. Having taught web design courses in the past, and not wanting spend subject specific course time to teach my environmental studies students how make web pages, I hoped to use VASE to keep the elements apart. As well, I realized that by creating an identical template for all students I would not be evaluating the design, but rather the content. And I feel that too much thought is put into non-functional design parameters when thought should be placed on content.
That said, I was, and am, very interested in students considering their coursework to be more than an exercise in summative evaluation, and the product meant to be consumed by the evaluator. As education is in part preparatory, and as my most all of my students would be moving towards work in a public field, I wanted them to gain from the experience of their work being public, and that their work was meant to be shared by others. To this end, I also encourage students to look at previous year's work, and to consider building upon it.
With phase one, the basic components were in place, and the proposed work for phase two was to implement designs that will allow an instructor to configure the environment to the needs of her particular class and assignment. That is, instead of having a programmer build the template, we wanted every instructor to be able to construct a template on her own from preset elements.
How educators use it.
Educators treat the site as a student would, exploring the examples and content as a user without considering constructing elements.
Using the built in interactive guide and help, instructors work through the template to construct not only the form students will fill in, but the assignment description and descriptors for each element.
Educators can revise the assignment as much as they want up until the point that students start working on the assignment. After this point, educators can change everything but the number and composition of elements in the assignment (See Slide 4).
Educators can unhand in submitted papers, delete student assignments, archive whole assignments, and erase assignments.
There is no mechanism for evaluation within VASE at this moment.
Students, like educators, can create accounts and reset passwords. Account creation is manual for this version (meaning that I have to telnet in and make up accounts). Resetting passwords is automatic (see Slides 3 & 4).
As with the instructor, they can choose to follow instructions for their particular assignment, or just poke about looking at other assignments. There is no attempt to compartmentalize the learning into subject domains at this point. I personally think that the more faculty have a chance to look at what their peers are up to the better it is for learning.
There is no function limiting students to only answering assignments from a particular instructor. They just choose what they want. I've not found a need to limit this, but I'm sure some student will start doing the wrong paper soon enough and complain that it was the educator's fault.
Students have both the built-in VASE instructions, and specific instructions from the instructor on how to complete the assignments.
Students can return to their work over and over, merely being required to 'save and view' the work when they are done. When they are finished, they click on the submit button. The assignment becomes viewable from the main assignment page, is listed along with a time stamp in the instructor's management page, and is no longer editable by the student. They have produced a public document.
The following sixteen images are screen grabs that show the basic steps required to interact with the VASE server. Slides 1-3 cover logging in and account creation. Slides 4-8 cover interacting with the server. Slides 9-16 cover the creation of an assignment. Click on each image for a larger picture in a pop up window. To interact with VASE yourself, jump right in and try it as a guest, or apply for an account and design an assignment, over the summer. There is contextual help for everything... if you're willing to read what's on the screen, you can use VASE. There is an opportunity for a limited number of faculty from other universities to use VASE on our server with their classes.
|
1) Splashpage |
2) Login |
3) Account Creation |
4) Faculty |
|
5) The Assignment Server |
6) Example part 1 |
7) Example part 2 |
8) Example part 3 |
|
9) Vase Manager |
|
11) New Project 2 |
12) Project Editor 1 |
|
|
13) Project Editor 3 |
15) Project Editor 4 |
16) Test Assignment |
Well, not scientific, or based on solid research. Just 12 years working and teaching online, and realizing that more than anything, you just sometimes need a tool to get the job done. VASE is not everything, it is one tool for making assignment templates, and it will do that well. It is meant to be something that can be used unilaterally without recourse to an administrator or a technician, and this is of primary importance to me. This is a teacher concieved, teacher initiated, teacher done project. I left my academic and administrative hat at home for this one... er both hats.
Special thanks go out to Yuka Kajihara at yukazine.com for her cartoon image.
This is mostly an 'off the top of my head' project, but I can point to some papers that have I've built these ideas from. They're partly mine, but they have good bibliographies ;-)
Learning Cyberspace: An Educational View of Virtual Community (http://achieve.utoronto.ca/papers/learning_cyberspace.html) [With Joel Weiss]
RESEARCHERS STEPPING OUT: REALIZING RESEARCH FOOTINGS IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS (http://achieve.utoronto.ca/aera99/nolan.html)
DOING LEARNING: BUILDING CONSTRUCTIONIST SKILLS FOR EDUCATORS or THEATRE OF METAPHOR: SKILLS CONSTRUCTING FOR BUILDING EDUCATORS(http://achieve.utoronto.ca/noisey/html/projcool/conferences/doing.html)[With Lynn Davie]
The Vase environment was funding by a grant from the Instructional Technology Courseware Development Fund of the University of Toronto, and by spinning off some technology from Project Achieve (http://achieve.utoronto.ca), a collaborative virtual learning environment funded by contract from Schoolnet/Industry Canada. VASE is supported by the Division of the Environment and the Knowledge Media Design Institute.
Licensing/commercial development potential:
As this server resides on an existing database server, it cannot be packaged as a stand-alone application for sale at this point. However, it may be possible to license the server for use by other organizations using this existing database technology. As well, we are exploring the possibility of porting the environment to a Java-based environment in the future. VASE has been registered as in invention with Research Services at theUniversity of Toronto, and VASE Version 2.0 is presently being released under the GPL (General Public License) (for more information visit the GNU Project and the Free Software foundation @ http://www.fsf.org/). Version 3.0 will have a restricted release for beta testing.Version 4.0 is intended to be release commercially probably as Shareware.
| Educational Staff (as of July 2000) | Programming Staff |
| Jason Nolan, BEd, MA, PhD (expected 11/00), Project Director Rhonna Robbins-Sponaas, MA, Educational Coordinator TBA, Educational Assistant TBA, Educational Assistant Simone Maurice, Educational Assistant Nicholas Davis, BA, Educational Trainee |
Leigh Casey, BSc, Database Director |
Jason Nolan BEd, MA, is a Lecturer and Associate Educational Coordinator with the Division of the Environment of the University of Toronto, and is putting the finishing touches on his PhD Dissertation tentatively titled "Why teachers can't do technology: and why it is not their fault!" at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. He is on the steering committee of the Knowledge Media Design institute, and active in educational research, teacher development and running a couple of MOOs. His homepage is http://achieve.utoronto.ca/jason, and email is jason.nolan@utoronto.caCopyright (c) 2000 D. Jason Nolan. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant Sections being the text. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License". http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/fdl.html
